I collect cups, coffee cups to be exact. I have been collecting them going on 60 years, and with a lot of agony I am contemplating calling it quits.

It started innocently about 1956 when I pilfered a blue cup from the Mammoth Mountain coffee shop with a skier on one side and Mammoth Mountain on the other. My wife and I met skiing at Mammoth in 1955 and married in 1956, so I thought I would commemorate the occasion with a couple of cups. The only problem was I could never find the second blue cup to match the first one. But it was the start of a hobby that encompasses about eight shelves, a cupboard and a few boxes lying around the garage.

I have cups from places we traveled to all over the world. I do have other cups from places we skied, such as Innsbruck, Austria, where my wife took a tumble and was a little stiff the next day, so I traveled to St. Anton by train by myself. I made the mistake of taking the mile-high gondola from one peak to another and was so shaken from looking down that I forgot to even look for cups there.

We have others from Europe, including fine clear glass cups from Italy; Paris cups with the Eiffel Tower; two beer steins from the Hofbrau in Munich, Germany; and cups from Holland with the windmills, which brings to mind looking for the old windmills. I inquired where to see them and followed the young girl’s instructions and found them, only she thought I meant the wind turbines.

I have Irish coffee cups from Ireland along with two four leaf-clover lucky cups. Oh yeah, since I am of Swedish decent, when we traveled to Sweden I picked up several there: two pink-and-charcoal-colored cups with Kaffee printed on the sides and two with pictures of red “Dala Horses” on them. If you have never seen Dala horses, they are unique to Sweden and are produced in Dalarna County using a variety of materials but usually carved out of wood, of which I have many in all sizes and colors. We also have cups from the Virgin Islands and from other islands in the Caribbean.

Cups from all over

We have a lot of cups from all over the United States, but my wife’s favorites are the ones with sunflowers on them from Lindsborg, Kansas, where we visited the Swedish Midsummer’s Festival one year. Note, Lindsborg has pony-size, beautifully painted Dala horses in front of most businesses and restaurants in town. Her family was from Kansas and only a few miles from there, so we looked up all her cousins and the homes of her father and grandfather.

And, of course, we have some from Bryce Canyon and the Grand Canyon. I think the prettiest cups are the ones from the balloon festival in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with the colorful balloons on them. We have two really ornate ones from Reno, Nevada, where our son lived and where we visit quite often. We also have two cups from the Kentucky Derby where we went for our 50th anniversary. I take that back, we have two mint julep glasses from there. My favorite cups are the ones from Quartzsite, Arizona, where we go for the winter to collect rocks; they have burros and cacti and an old sign on them that says “in the middle of nowhere.”

I have a lot of other cups, mostly from programs I worked on at TRW for more than 30 years. Those are mostly in the garage, I guess, because they are mine and I don’t need any reminders of toiling long and hard hours during the space race. One of them is in the cupboard and has “Ernie” on the side and a message on the bottom that you can’t see until you drink all the coffee.

Happiness associated with cups

But most of the cups bring happy memories like the ones we picked up driving the Pacific Coast visiting all the lighthouses. I got one cup recently when I visited Treasure Island in San Francisco. I went there for a program put on by the Treasure Island Museum Association. It featured Jean Moulin, the wife of Tom Moulin, who is the grandson of the famed photographer Gabriel Moulin, who as the official photographer took all the photographs of the 1939-40 San Francisco World’s Fair on Treasure Island.

We also have two Halloween cups with black cats and pumpkins that we use once a year for hot apple cider while we host trick-or-treaters. And last, but not least, four cups from South Korea, where we traveled in 2011 for my 60th anniversary of fighting the war over there. The Korean government hosted and paid for the trip to show their appreciation for our service to keep North Korea from taking over their country. Those cups mean a lot to me as reminder of what I did in the U.S. Army from 1950-52.

And like I said, I think I am going to stop collecting cups as I am 86 now and am trying to figure out what to do with the ones I have when I go (and I don’t mean on a trip).

Ernie Ogren is a Torrance resident who retired from the former TRW in Redondo Beach.

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